For a few magical months in 2012, everyone was doing the horse dance.
Didn’t matter if you lived in Seoul, Sao Paulo or a small town in Slovakia. People who had never even heard of K-pop were shouting “Oppa Gangnam Style” with zero context and 100% enthusiasm.
It wasn’t controversial. It wasn’t trying to push an agenda. It wasn’t even trying to go viral. It wasn’t trying to sell you anything (besides maybe sunglasses and invisible horses). It was just this absurd, joyful, universally goofy moment that somehow transcended language, culture and borders.
There were no rival factions, no outrage cycles (maybe a few snarky comments), no thinkpieces dissecting it to death and no desperate challenges-for-clout. Just shared laughter, parodies, flash mobs and a song none of us fully understood
The internet vibed. Together. For once.
Compare that to now, where everything trending feels heavy or divisive. Gangnam Style was a weird little moment of global unity that we haven’t seen before or since.
Call it silly or nostalgia. But maybe that’s what peace looks like: 2 billion people galloping in sync like absolute fools and loving every second of it.
I freaking LOVE the 2012 Gangnam Style era and it kinda stings hearing it today. Because if it happened now, it’d be buried in noise and algorithm trends.
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Eh there were lots of viral and goofy dances since then. Maybe not quite as popular and with a bit of a different vibe
As someone in his thirties, I hated this song, the dance, the trend,
This is how I feel about Tiger King. Not quite the reach, but Covid just hit in America and we were all cooped up. Everyone just binged this ridiculous show and we all laughed together. I get the point you’re making
Ya unpopular cause Macarena was like this but way more popular.
laughs in Macarena
With music, sure but nothing brought us together like Pokemon Go when it first launched.
I had a military dorm mate who shared your perspective and would blast this damn song every time we were on cleaning duty with the enthusiasm of a 5-year-old. God I hated it, and no matter how many times I suggested he use headphones, he always looked at me with a blank stare of bemusement, as if he couldn’t understand different tastes and an appreciation for quietness.
You’re more than welcome to your goofy songs OP, but not everybody’s up for the same ride.
Wow i’d love my brain to be this simple.
I thought it was stupid at the time but you’re right in alot of ways.
I remember he was actually invited to perform at a freaking white house Christmas dinner and started out by singing a Christmas sing before stopping about 30 seconds in, saying they all know that’s not why he’s here and getting into it. the audiences cheered almost inappropriately wildly given the venue when the gangham style music started.
I think what’s tragic us that we can come together on ultimately pointless and stupid shit like this but on anything important that involves intellectual discourse we’re never even close. we have the capacity to come together, just not when it counts.
I just miss 2012 in general. Was a great year for me.
You must not be old enough to remember Weird Al’s “Amish paradise.”
Happy. Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof. Because I’m happy.
There was heaps of bullshit surrounding him after it blew up. He’d performed anti American songs onstage then apologised after he got famous.
Not music but Pokémon go was pretty big. Everyone I knew was playing that.
fully agree, I also feel like Old Town Road achieved this as well.
What about Thriller by Michael Jackson?
Gangnam Style is an absolute banger and I listen to it probably 4 or 5 times every day
Don’t worry, be happy.
There’s one thing I really enjoy about that small period. It’s that it was the first time in forever that the international music sphere was not that focused solely on the Anglo sphere.
Think about it, how much of top 10 songs of the month of mainstream pop/rock/rnb English speaking ? Nothing against that, but it’s kinda sad that so much of the world’s musical attention is focused on such a narrow creative “niche”.
Wow. Have an upvote.
Really wasn’t a fan.
Didn’t the singer end up doing himself a bit of mischief from all that horsing out?
Oh no. It was so bad
But was the macarena hit also in asia?
How quickly we forget the Macarena
I live in Japan, and even though K-pop is huge here, Gangnam Style was barely a blip on the radar. I think it’s because they only like the cool, attractive K-pop artists here.
Idk, ABBA existed long before 2012
Totally agree! Just pure stupid fun
The kid missed the Macarena
Fun fact: Gangnam Style “broke” the YouTube view counter. The view counter on YouTube used a signed 32-bit number at the time, so the maximum number was 2,147,483,647.
no, it was probably something like The Twist, the Charleston, or when Christmas carols and Thanksgiving ones (like Jingle Bells) first popped up
Now imagine this feeling for music stretched out for a decade. That’s disco, baby. Just pure fun and optimism
I was born well after the disco era and I always thought the music was lame but honestly I’ve began to look back on it and feel melancholy that I missed it. I feel like it represents a sense of freedom and carelessness we don’t experience collectively today
Psy has tons of good music. Thank you Gangnam Style for opening my eyes.
I think the early to mid 2010s felt more fun, joyful, silly and optimistic. I really miss it. LMFAO and gangnam style really were products of it.
Its the inverse rickroll
Holy shit that song is bad dude
Maybe it was just my age or friend group (I was a 21 year old crust punk adjacent) but I honestly didn’t know anyone who actually liked it personally. People I knew had reactions to it that ranged from ambivalent to hostile.
That beat still slaps
Yessss I was traveling in south america and a village of probably 500 people had a festival and all the kids did this song / dance as part of it. Core memory, so cute, so weird, so … well … global yet non-western. Felt special.
Until OP finds out what the song is actually about
> It was just this absurd, joyful, universally goofy moment that somehow transcended language, culture and borders.
I mean, if you don’t have any cultural context of the song lol. The song itself is a parody of a bougie lifestyle in Seoul. Like, the singer himself has said:
“People who are actually from Gangnam never proclaim that they are—it’s only the posers and wannabes that put on these airs and say that they are “Gangnam Style”—so this song is actually poking fun at those kinds of people who are trying very hard to be something that they’re not.[“
It’s one K-Pop song that came out about 13 years ago.
There’s a ton of it out there. Japanese pop and rock is also very energetic.
But yeah, Gangnam Style was popular in the US the year before anime really hit mainstream (Attack on Titan and Sword Art Online).
Not Today is a great song by Korean boy band BTS. You may have heard the name BTS. You may have heard their music is poppy and rappy (e.g. Dynamite, which is also good), but Not Today just goes way harder than any K-pop song has any right to. Here’s the YouTube link. Put the captions on, set it to English. It has official English subtitles that will tell you exactly what they’re saying when they speak Korean. The TL;DW is, they’re saying the world is full of temptations, but it won’t get between them or break up their friendship. (The band is on hiatus because of their required military service. They plan to resume when they’re all done with that.) That was in 2017.
On the Japanese side, you got Creepy Nuts with Yofukashino Uta (“Stayin’ Up Lullaby”) according to the record label… but it’s known by another name, Call of the Night. Both translations are accurate. Google translates it to “Night Owl Song.” Same thing. But Call of the Night is the name of the manga the song inspired. The manga got adapted into an anime. In the anime, the band appear at a party and hit on the main girl. In the Japanese dub, they even voice the jerks. (It’s a couple randos in the English dub.) Again, captions on because it has official English subtitles. YouTube link. And that was in 2019.
There’s a lot of good shit out there.